The shining light of Europe’s bright émigrés

“To those who in their homeland have no freedom, and to those who in their freedom have no homeland.” That toast was drunk by countless east European émigrés during five decades of exile, when few dreamed their captive countries would regain freedom so dramatically. Even fewer would have imagined that, nearly 20 years after the collapse of communism, their communities would be supplying three presidents (in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) and half a dozen ministers elsewhere.

European Voice

1/17/07, 5:00 PM CET

Updated 1/22/16, 1:16 PM CET

In the early post-communist years it was unsurprising that émigrés did well. Some had contacts and clout. Others had simply lived in the system that their homelands now wanted to emulate. In 1990 Pauls Raudseps, a young American-Latvian, became managing editor of Diena, his country’s new western-style daily, not because he was an experienced journalist, but because he had read western papers and knew what they ought to look like.

Locals felt a mixture of admiration, envy and resentment. Stasys Lozoraitis, Lithuania’s charming and able émigré diplomat, returned home in 1993 after a lifetime spent representing a vanished country, to fight the presidential election. But he was easily defeated: Lithuanians, poverty-stricken in the wake of the Soviet collapse, doubted that a suave cosmopolitan, married to a sexy Italian aristocrat, could understand their problems. Instead they chose a reassuring, stodgy ex-Communist – a mistake that cost them dearly.

Sometimes suspicions were well-founded. Chancers, losers and nutters who had failed in the real world saw a wonderful chance to reinvent themselves as ‘experts’ on security, finance or public relations. They were soon squeezed out by more competent locals.

But the arguments can still be incendiary. The appointment of Karel Schwarzenberg as foreign minister of the Czech Republic in that country’s latest temporary government has infuriated its president, Václav Klaus. Schwarzenberg heads one of the Hapsburg empire’s grandest families. He has lived most of his life in Austria, where his family fled following the Soviet-backed communist putsch of 1948. Arch-patriots for their lost homeland, they always spoke Czech at home, so the new foreign minister speaks a remarkable archaic Czech redolent of cultured, solid, pre-war Czechoslovakia, rather than the debased version that developed under communist rule.

Klaus’s vituperative attacks on Schwarzenberg’s supposed foreignness seem to come straight from the 19th-century heyday of Czech nationalism, when the country was struggling to reassert its identity in the Hapsburg empire and the greatest enemies of a Czech patriot were Germans, priests and nobles. Schwarzenberg is not a priest, but in Klaus’s eyes he is something even worse. Having returned home after the collapse of communism in 1989, he became a senior aide to Klaus’s rather more engaging precedessor and arch-foe, Václav Havel. That puts him firmly in the camp of the priesthood of elitist, soggy-liberal, unpatriotic elements.

Although not a member of that party, he has been nominated by the Czech Greens (a pragmatic outfit quite unlike their woolly minded western counterparts). Running the Schwarzenberg estates gave him an excellent knowledge of modern, environmentally sensitive forestry, he notes.

Schwarzenberg’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the region, gravitas, and salty humour look set, sadly, to be a brief footnote in the dreary, seven-month saga of the Czech Republic’s deadlocked politics (following an election in June that ended in a tie). This time round, at least. The enduring Czech failure to form a proper government exemplifies the continuing weakness of post-communist politics: squabbling, self-interested, short-term, and shunned by the voters. Still, it is those shortcomings that give class acts from the outside like Prince Karl XVII von Schwarzenberg (to give him his Austrian title) a chance to shine.

The author is central and eastern Europe correspondent of The Economist.